A significant risk in contact center operations is not always making the wrong move; it’s delaying or making no move at all. Operations leaders who delay action on modernizing capacity planning processes and delay in making critical staffing and resource decisions negatively impact the customer experience, agent satisfaction & turnover, and overall costs to serve.
In both large and small multi-channel contact center environments, customer demand is volatile and unpredictable. Phone, chat, email, offline, and social volumes shift on a weekly/monthly/seasonal basis, leading to dynamic staffing level requirements that create both opportunities and risks. Small missteps and/or delays in leadership’s decisions around hiring compound quickly given the long (6-8+ week) lead times required to effectively recruit, hire, and train front-line contact center resources.
The cost of ineffective forecasting, capacity planning, and hiring/staffing decision delays negatively impact many operational, customer experience, and financial outcomes. Customers feel the impact through long wait times, unanswered chats, or inconsistent service. Agents shoulder the burden when understaffing drives relentless occupancy, burnout, and turnover. Dealy’s or missteps in effective short-term and long-term planning can also cause a strain on HR and Training support resources.
Executives, without reliable forward-looking models and data-driven decision support tools, are forced to make reactionary and often costly decisions that attempt to dig the operation out of a vicious cycle of lower customer experience and service levels, higher agent attrition, longer hand times, lower first call resolution, and overall higher cost to serve.
Best practice contact center operators and WFM leaders embrace advanced planning, various levels of scenario modeling and staff planning, multi-skill optimization, and integrated recruitment and training planning to effectively forecast and plan both near-term and long-term resource requirements. Every week of inaction or poor planning tools or processes compounds the losses that could have been avoided with better foresight.
For over 38 years, McIntosh has helped our clients develop and implement customized WFM planning approaches and processes, staffing models, and workload demand forecasting tools to help drive successful operational outcomes through effective and proactive contact center capacity and resource planning.
